


Spectres of Shada

by RyanWritesStuff



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Time War, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-23 02:37:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11980302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RyanWritesStuff/pseuds/RyanWritesStuff
Summary: At the height of the Last Great Time War, the Time Lord formerly known as the Doctor is dispatched on a top-priority mission to a long-destroyed warzone he had hoped never to return to...





	1. Arrival

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again! A little different this time, enjoy a War Doctor tale! This was originally written as part of an attempt to submit to a short story anthology and, in fact, was almost published! Almost. I'm not bitter or anything (I am). Enjoy it!

  The Doctor sighed.

  It was a quiet sigh, but in the silence of his TARDIS console room, it spoke volumes.

  Once that console room had been full of sounds; sparks and bleeps emitting from the console itself, machinery with increasingly-questionable functions doing their inscrutable work, and of course the sound of voices; of laughter and talking, of yelling and crying.

  There were none of those any more, however.

  No more.

  He tapped a few buttons on one of the console’s keyboards, programming in his chosen destination ( _“chosen”_ may have been something of an inaccurate term. Certainly not chosen by the Doctor himself). His eyes, soft and grey and so very old now, scanned over the dusty screen as his destination’s coordinates came into view.

  He sighed again.

  He’d never wanted to go back there, but then he hadn’t particularly wanted to go _anywhere_ for centuries now. He didn’t travel by choice too often these days.

 

  The groaning wheeze of the TARDIS materialising echoed around a desolate landscape, quiet as the void of space above. The door opened and the Doctor stepped out, feeling something glass crunch underneath his boots. He pulled his leather coat, worn and battered by stress, tighter around him and took a deep breath.

  His first wary glance around took everything in.

  He was standing on a rocky surface; a great asteroid, as was revealed by the grey horizon in the distance. It was huge, lumpy and misshapen with protrusions from the ground that were the size of mountains in their own right. The TARDIS had landed upon such a patch of higher ground and, from here, the Doctor could see for miles around; the rock-formed plains of the asteroid.

  Those plains could barely be seen beneath the wreckage that littered them.

  Crashed Dalek saucers of bronze and gold littered the landscape, in some places so deep that they were practically making formations of their own. Even from here, the Doctor could see long-destroyed weapon systems sparking, smoke still rising from breached reactors. Dalek ships weren’t the only wreckage, of course; there were countless silvery capsules that indicated the presence of TARDISes, shot down long ago. Every so often, it was clear to see that one of their outer plasmic shells had been breached by the Dalek weapons. Spires of twisted metal and decrepit control systems ballooned out of capsules far too small to hold them; a nightmarish art display that stood in eternal testament to the destructive might the Daleks could bring to bear.

  The Doctor had seen many TARDISes suffer such a fate. One had inverted itself to such a degree that it had ended up displacing a nearby planet and its moons. The Time Lords had been forced to shunt it into the Vortex and simply let it burn up.

  It didn’t bear thinking about.

  If he strained his eyes, he could make out smaller chunks of detritus. Daleks. Dead for decades, their shells still remained behind.

  It was one of the war’s more bitter observations. The corpses of fallen Time Lords would eventually decay and wither away into nothing. The Daleks outlasted them. Even in death, the Daleks outlasted the Time Lords.

  He looked away, focusing instead on his reason for coming here. Ahead, through miles of wreckage and rubble, stood a lone building, an outpost of some sort. Half of it had been caved in when a Dalek saucer had smashed through its roof; the vessel still protruded from it even now. It was a small and relatively unassuming outpost, but that was to be expected. It was only an entrance, after all, there were many like it within walking distance alone.

  The real destination lay below, in the belly of the asteroid. Countless tunnels and corridors, a veritable labyrinth hidden just below the surface the Doctor now stood upon.

  Most people who came here tried to break out.

  It was rare that anyone would seek to break _in_ to this place.

  The Doctor sighed once more, the name coming unbidden to his mind.

  “ _Shada_.”

 

  He picked his way across the wreckage, slowly but with iron surety. His boots scuffed metal, dislodged gravel, and more than once crushed long-aged bone underneath their weight.

  There, then, were the corpses.

  The Doctor didn’t look down at the ground. His gaze stayed level, staring dead ahead. He didn’t need to see any more bodies, he’d seen more in the last few years than he’d ever seen in his long, long life.

  He felt numbed against it.

  He hated himself for that, just a little, but what else could he do?

  To his left was a cluster of Dalek chassis that had fused together under the heat of some devastating weapon; six eyestalks protruded from various angles on the misshapen entity’s body, six gunsticks reduced to twisted lumps of melted scrap. The Dalek creatures themselves, of course, would have died an age ago when their life support failed.

  “…Hm.”

  The Doctor muttered in mild surprise as he took a step past. One of the gunsticks twitched in his direction; a solitary eyestalk swivelling to follow him. In a matter of moments, all of the remaining eyestalks bar one were doing the same thing, tracking his movements with slow, jerky motions. Just one eyestalk remained dim and unmoving.

  The Doctor stopped walking, turning to look fully at the horrific amalgamation of Dalek that sat before him. He wondered what thoughts were passing through the mind of such a creature, if indeed it could think. Was there anything left of the original Dalek mindset in there, or had years of immobile isolation driven it completely insane even by their lofty standards?

  “ _EX…EX…EX…_ ”

  Three of its half-functioning gunsticks painstakingly rotated to face the Doctor and shivered a few times.

  It had tried to fire at him.

  Even after all of this, all it had been through, it was _still_ trying to fire; still trying to kill just one more Time Lord…

  The Doctor felt strangely compelled to laugh in spite of himself.

  Daleks were many things; the Time Lords had learned that at great cost over the course of this war. They were merciless, they were murderous, they were hateful and spiteful and wrathful…and above all else, they were _resilient_. Everything the Time Lords could throw at them, the Daleks survived.

  _No_ , the Doctor thought, _they did more than survive. They came back stronger._

  This Dalek, or rather this cluster of Daleks, must have been sitting here in exactly the same position since the terrible battle that had claimed Shada as just another casualty of the Time War. Fused to their own kindred, a conglomeration that should have died long ago…and still they persisted.

  It was enough to make one despair.

  Not the Doctor, though.

  To the Doctor, it was just one more day. The Daleks had run out of ways to surprise him long ago. They just made him weary now.

  He reached a hand into one of the pouches of the bandolier he wore, drawing his sonic screwdriver from it as he looked down upon the Dalek, still attempting to screech at him but failing.

  “ _EX…EX…EX…_ ”

  “Don’t bother,” the Doctor said to it, more coldly than perhaps he had intended, “you’re long past your exterminating days. _Long_ past.”

  He began tinkering with its numerous gunstick ports. He’d grown quite adept at this over the course of the war, but it was rare that he was actually able to put it into practice. Daleks typically didn’t sit still enough to casually reprogram their own weapon systems. The gunsticks on this monstrosity were useless and unable to fire, but they could still hold a charge.

  That was all he needed.

  “ _YOU._ ”

  Garbled and scratching as the word was, the fused Daleks had still spoken quite coherently. The Doctor paused and looked the multitude in one of its eyestalks.

  “…”

  “ _IT…IS…YOU?_ ”

  “That rather depends on who you mean,” the Doctor muttered.

  “ _YOU…ARE…THE…THE…_ ”

  The Daleks had started to falter, likely due to the energy that was being siphoned from their inner reserves into their weapon systems, which were beginning to power up with a distinct telltale hum.

  “I’m nobody,” the Doctor said solemnly.

  “ _…DOC-_ ”

  The Daleks stuttered.

  “ _DOC…DOC…DOC…DOC…DOC…_ ”

  The Doctor suspected that the creature had gone into some sort of mental loop; an inevitable consequence of so many minds having come together as one. His screwdriver pulsed once, causing the gunsticks to shimmer with a hazy luminescence as they charged, ready to fire.

  “ _DOC…TOR._ ”

  The Doctor froze momentarily, startled.

  “ _YOU…ARE…THE…DOCTOR!_ ”

  He blinked once before triggering his screwdriver again. The weapons on the melded chassis blazed with light for an instant, eliciting a static-riddled screech from the Daleks within. Their eyestalks ceased their motion, as did their gunsticks. It fell silent.

  “No,” the Doctor said, his voice tinged with unmistakeable regret, “…no, I’m not.”

  He resumed his journey towards the outpost in the distance. The prison below awaited him.


	2. The Data-Slice

  A quick buzz of the sonic screwdriver got him through what remained of the security protocols that had barred entry to this place once upon a time. The Doctor knew that there wasn’t much left in the way of protection for Shada any longer (not that anyone would have come there any more, of course). The ancient Time Lord prison had lost almost all of its defensive measures during the battle that had destroyed it.

  He could still see some of those measures now as he entered one of the access corridors, leading to the prison complex below him. The stasis traps that guarded every single door in Shada had long expired, or already been used. One of them was still active, the Doctor observed, a Dalek eternally frozen in time adorning the corridor nearby. It had clearly attempted to fire its gunstick; the blast was still hovering still in the air, never to hit its target.

  The Doctor’s footsteps echoed in the silence as he walked. He wasn’t hurrying by any means; this prison had once held the most dangerous criminals in all of time and space, but they had died with Shada itself.

  He ran a hand idly over the frozen Dalek’s chassis and peered at the hovering gunstick blast. Even now, to touch it would cause searing burns and agony; perhaps even death. Part of him wondered what the creature had spent its last moments attempting to accomplish. The piles of Gallifreyan armour and dust in the corner suggested to him that it had done quite well for itself.

  The very thought sickened him.

  He glanced upwards at the ceiling. There were small nodes built subtly into the walls; artificial irises that belonged to security cameras with nobody observing on the other end. They were blank and dead as everything else here was.

  Perhaps they were the reason the Doctor felt as if he was being watched.

  He didn’t think so, however.

  He walked onwards, deeper into the prison complex. His thoughts, in more disarray than he cared to admit, wandered backwards in time to the last times he had stood upon these grounds. He’d had his flirtations with visiting Shada many a time, of course; there was the whole business with Professor Chronotis in his fourth incarnation (or had it been his eighth? He was beginning to lose track) long before the Time War had come to pass.

  “Before the Time War…” He muttered aloud to himself, his voice hoarse and dry from lack of use.

  It was almost absurd to consider that there had been such a period. He could no longer remember a day when the Last Great Time War was not raging across the universe like some great unstoppable blaze, devouring everything in its path. If he thought particularly long and hard on the matter and devoted a great deal of mental effort to it, he could nearly recall the days before he had ever heard the word “Dalek”.

  Nearly.

  He reached a stairwell that lay beyond a doorframe at the end of the corridor, the lights that should have illuminated it long dead and gone. He didn’t step out into it right away; instead, he pressed his back against the wall beside it, taking great care not to show even an inch of himself beyond the doorway’s edge. He held the activation button on his screwdriver for precisely three and a half seconds and then, delicately and cautiously, he reached around the frame of the door and released it.

  Silent and invisible other than a single quiet ‘beep’, a burst of sonic waves pulsed down the stairwell, brushing against the molecules of everything along it for several flights. The Doctor waited for feedback of any sort from the device, anything other than detritus and the building structure itself.

  There was none.

  If there was anything alive down there, it was concealed from the screwdriver’s scanning functions. The Doctor doubted that; it was vastly more likely that the path ahead was simply an empty one.

  That suited him just fine.

  Stepping out onto the first of the stairs, he triggered the flashlight function of the screwdriver and held it out in front of him like a wand. A beam of dull blue-tinted light cut through the darkness, picking out debris that littered the smooth white steps leading downwards. Here, too, there were corpses; ancient and reduced to dust like all the rest above. It was unsurprising. The Doctor had witnessed Gallifreyan soldiers die in numbers so appalling that even to recall them was too violent a memory to be worthwhile; he had seen Time Lord commanders shot down by the Daleks only to regenerate and be shot down again.

  There were rumours that had flitted along the battle lines that the Dalek High Command would promote those who managed to kill all thirteen incarnations of the same Time Lord; as if it was some contest of deeds to them. The Doctor was absolutely certain it was, and if nothing else the thought brought a dour smile to his face.

  No Dalek would ever be promoted for doing that to him.

  He was in his ninth body now, and he was adamant in his certainty that he would never have another.

  There were dead Daleks, too, and plenty of them. The Gallifreyans had not given them an inch, even as Shada shook itself apart in its death throes. Splintered and shattered Dalekanium plates littered the floor, joined by the occasional eyestalk or broken manipulator arm.

  At the beginning of the war, he still would have flinched to look upon such wanton destruction, but he was long past that point.

  It would be rather hypocritical of him.

  He’d caused enough of it.

  An eerie chill drifted up and down his spine and he pulled his coat tighter about him. There was definitely something amiss with the situation, but that narrowed it down to exactly nothing helpful. Places this badly scarred by the Time War were inevitably slightly out of touch with reality. In the early days of the war, such feelings of unease and cold sensations usually meant that the Reapers were coming to repair the wounds caused to the flow of causality, but they had been wiped out in a concentrated campaign by the Daleks with incredible efficiency. Not one had been seen since.

  It occurred to the Doctor that he was thinking in an unusually reflective manner, but then the day did rather call for such thoughts.

  He was, in a way, here to confront the past directly.

  Running a finger along a long glassy scar burned into the wall by some horrific Dalek weapon, his instincts directed him along the first corridor to his left he came to, the one at the bottom of the stairs. The beam of light from his screwdriver illuminated a hallway with little difference to any of the others; perhaps a little more battle-scarred than those seen thus far. The space at the end had been an important prize for the Daleks, and they had done everything in their power to take it.

  The automatic door to the room had been torn off of its sliding rail; shards of glass littered the floor where it had stood. They crunched under the Doctor’s boots as he stepped inside. It was the first sound other than his own footsteps he had heard since entering the prison’s confines. The Gallifreyan script, so elegant and beautiful in form, above the doorframe was still legible.

  “RECORDS CHAMBER”

  It was a circular room, various consoles and databanks lining the walls filled with all sorts of information on Shada’s occupants; criminal records, reasons for incarceration and the length of their sentences, special condition prisoners…it was all there.

  The right side of the room was home to a large empty space. That was where he had landed the TARDIS. Right there in that spot, on the night Shada had been destroyed.

  The centre of the chamber, however, was what drew the Doctor’s eye. There was a seat there, buttons and knobs dotted across one of its arms. Above it sat a dull chrome set of thick goggles, equally decorated with control devices. It was a link to the Matrix data-slice that formed the prison’s information infrastructure. One who used it could see everything that transpired in the prison at any given moment, and everything that ever had. The countless security cameras would become their eyes; the intercoms and speakers their ears.

  In the days when Shada had been filled with the worst of the universe’s dictators, meddlers and criminals, the sights and sounds would have been enough to drive a person mad (and it quite often did). Now, though, perhaps the deafening silence that would greet a new operator of the system would have been unsettling in its own manner.

  The Doctor sat in the chair.

  He flicked a dark silver switch on the edge to activate it. A hum, rising in tone, indicated that the data-slice was still functioning as intended, though the Doctor could see several signs of damage and he suspected that there would be at least a few glitches in it. There was nothing to be done for that, however.

  He had a mission to accomplish here.

  Reaching up, he grasped the cool metal of the goggles, pulled them down, and placed them over his eyes. His vision disappeared, replaced by inky darkness too impenetrable to see.

  “Activate Matrix,” the Doctor said aloud.

  The goggles whirred into activation. He inhaled and exhaled at length, and focused his thoughts onto one specific subject. He could feel the mental tendrils of the Matrix’s sensors probing at his mind, attempting to focus on what he intended it to. It was taking a little longer than it usually did-

 

  - _War agony pain EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE fall fall fall Shada is falling vortex bomb Dalek fleet outnumbered death death so much death EXTERMINATE war warn Gallifrey fire evacuate run run **run** EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE-_

 

  The Doctor felt blood on his hands. Not the metaphorical blood now; no; this was entirely literal. It was thick and viscous and carmine and it dripped from his fingers.

  The room around him was ablaze. It burned with bright flames that licked the walls and threatened to consume everything in sight.

  The sound was the worst. The _noise_ that filled the air was deafening in a way that defied logical explanation. It filled the whole mind and threatened never to leave it again; it was enough to make one forget that such a concept as ‘silence’ had ever existed in the first place. Screams of the dying and the wounded melded with an orchestra of staser fire and gunstick blasts; the dull throb of thousands of Dalek saucers and the smooth groan of TARDISes in flight rose and fell as the battle in the skies above raged on unseen, and permeating all was that one abominable word screeched and howled by seventy billion voices all in perfect, horrifying unison.

  “ ** _EXTERMINATE!_** ”

  The blood must have been from whoever had been operating the data-slice at the time. Looking down, the Doctor confirmed it. He didn’t know whose mind he was temporarily inhabiting but their torso was a mess of sickly dark red; evidently the work of a Dalek manipulator arm. Screams of panic came from the doorway, and as he turned his view to look in its direction he saw four Gallifreyan soldiers desperately firing their staser rifles wildly into the hallway beyond.

  His TARDIS stood in the same empty spot he had remembered it being in; its blue paint dull and chipped, its windows cracked and its sign damaged. The War had not been kind to it. Somewhere, his own past self was down below in the vaults of Shada making yet another decision he should never have had to have made…

  This wasn’t what he had wanted to see, but he needed to see it.

  Shifting his mental perception, struggling against the damaged data-slice, the Doctor managed to dissolve the scene before him, observing the security footage now instead. Thousands of monitors faded in and out of his vision in a dreamlike trance, showing countless parts of Shada’s halls as the prison was torn to shreds by the Dalek attack, until he finally saw the one he needed and halted his search, focusing intently on it.

  Three words in hazy blue light hovered before his eyes, insubstantial and etheric.

  “ **CHAMELEON ARCH STORAGE.** ”


End file.
